Category: visual studio

2012

SignalR was built with scalability in mind. Even though you will be able to run a fair number of concurrent connections on a single server instance, there will come a point where a single node will not be able to handle the load. more

You may consider storing the content in a resource file and embed it in a class library. Or perhaps do a clever virtual directory mapping in your IIS setup. However, the best solution is simply to compile the views into a class library using Razor Generator. more

A larger web projects would typically consist not only of front end web project, but would include additional class libraries and offload some of the heavy processing work to service or console apps. The common problem is then how do you update the front-end and signal the site that some work has been completed. more

A larger web projects would typically consist not only of front end web project, but would include additional class libraries and offload some of the heavy processing work to service or console apps. The common problem is then how do you update the front-end and signal the site that some work has been completed. more

A larger web projects would typically consist not only of front end web project, but would include additional class libraries and offload some of the heavy processing work to service or console apps. The common problem is then how do you update the front-end and signal the site that some work has been completed. more

The Clients dynamic property of the Hub gives you access to all clients connected to the hub within the hub class. However, what if you would like to push data to the clients from outside of the Hub class. One of the most common scenarios is when you want to push data to the clients from an admin system in your back-end. more

SignalR is an open source async signalling library. It was made by David Fowler and Damian Edwards. In a nutshell, it allows you to pass data between client and server in realtime. It’s not only for web, it has JS, .Net, WP7 and Silverlight clients and supports self-hosting so you can run the SignalR server in win service or web context. It will run on .Net 4.0 or 4.5 and to get websockets running, you will need IIS8 or IIS8 Express. That said, it will run on older versions of IIS and will switch to different transport modes. more

The new **System.Web.WebPages 2.0.0.0** assembly that ships with the latest MVC4 contains a pretty cool feature that lets you override the current browser capabilities. Sure, most modern browsers let you set a custom user agent string out of the box or via extensions. However, there are certain scenarios, where you would want to switch the user agent on the server side. That’s where the **BrowserHelpers** class comes in handy. more

In the previous post, I went on about how to use System.Web.Optimization library to minimize your page load times. However, the new library offers quite a lot of extensibility and even if you don’t want to use the default minification, you can still use the framework. more

Minimising the number of requests the page has to perform can have a considerable effect on your site’s performance. IE6 and IE7 both limit the number of concurrent requests to 2, IE8 can handle up to 6. There is a lot you can to improve the initial load speed speed – one of which is bundling all your CSS and JS into two separate files. How much of a difference it could do. Well, as it turns out up to 30seconds on slower connections. more

If for whatever reason you use IHttpHandlers in your MVC project, it may be that you are still using web.config to set the path to the handlers. This can get tricky and easy to miss, especially if you move from cassini dev to IIS7 live. There is however a better, neater way to declare paths to your handers. more

Model binding in MVC attempts to map values from IValueProviders to your specified model. The value providers (FormValueProvider, QueryStringValueProvider, HttpFileCollectionValueProvider, RouteDataValueProvider, JsonValueProviderFactory … ) abstract the actual value retrieval and binders then handle the value mapping onto the model. You can create custom model binders to abstract and centralise complex mapping logic that would otherwise end up in your controllers or services. When dealing with a larger number of binders, it is good to refactor common logic and enable wiring up of the new binders easily. Instead of having to register each binder one-by-one in global or prefix the type in the actions, we can create our own model binder broker to replace the default MVC DefaultModelBinder. more

2011

I like strongly typed view models in MVC. Typical structure of my site in Razor View Engine includes a page base model that is used in the Layout template and then I use inheritance to add properties to each model or commonly re-used properties. There are various reasons why to avoid dynamic in your models, besides the fact that you cannot use dynamic in master frame using razor. more

SASS is a super-set of CSS, that means, any existing CSS that you already wrote will just work. What we usually do, is paste any legacy CSS (if any) to our SASS file and take it from there. I’ve posted few examples of the syntax below. In my next post, I will focus on the real-world usage of SASS. more

Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets (SASS) aims to make writing CSS easy, re-usable and less repetitive. The new SCSS (Sassy CSS) syntax makes use of variables, mixins, nested rules and inheritance to achieve this goal. Furthermore, I will show you how to use compass to leverage in-built functionality. This series of posts will not argue between SASS and LESS, it will be a quick guide on how to get up and running with SASS within VS and how SASS can help you. more